It has been discovered that Jasmine Airlines, Lauterjung Logistics Ltd, UK Express, S1 Airlines and Epic Winning Airlines have been recently in violation with the game rules regarding airport slots.

The airlines have created so called "placeholder routes" in order to obtain more slots than what has been necessary for their fleet operation, in order to utilize the slots later to different destinations than originally planned. In other words the airlines have created routes from their base to a nearby destination in their dozens, with no intention of operating that route (flight times overlapping, no aircraft assigned to the routes etc) - or alternatively making routes that will just provide losses until replacements are scheduled.

This is clearly done just in order to grab as many slots in as little time as possible, and later edit the routes to their 'proper' destinations. This is directly forbidden in the rules.

All of the airlines have received a substantial fine (depending on the amount of misused routes, between $10mil and $100mil), the slots/routes in question have been removed.

I shall remind that from the first offense the action is to remove the routes/slots and issue a fine, but from the second offense the sanction is airline closure. Since rather many airlines have been investigated and fined today, the penalties for "slot offences" shall be substantially increased and will move to "one strike and you're out" type thing.

I am afraid that my previous notes and warnings were ineffective, at least in regards to one airline.

When one airline (LLL) folded at LHR ~hour ago, another airline (UK Express) grabbed immediately (during the same game day) a total of 238 LHR slots (18 different routes). This itself may be nothing suspectable or against the rules, but once again (like previously) nearly every of the routes created are such that they will not be operated by that airline.

1) they are (almost) all to same destination (AGP this time), while he already has several routes to that airport and only 2 additional daily routes would fill the rest of the demand. And the route flight times make no sense either, as many of them depart on the same minute.

2) all of the routes were created for DC-9 series, which he has none on order, and while the schedules of his existing DC-9 series have big blank spots, there is no way these routes would be scheduled to his existing fleet like such.

Example below in screen capture (part of routes).

I wish to point out once more that such copy-paste method of creating placeholder routes, even for near-future re-editing is not allowed in the game rules. Rule text mentions for example: In summary, airline is not allowed to create "placeholder" routes to obtain slots to use them later or to restrict competing airlines. In this case it is clearly about placeholder routes to get the slots as fast as possible and restrict competition by denying others a fair chance for the same slots. (to be noted, once these slots were released back to the pool some time ago, another airline based in LHR was also quick to assign routes to these - BUT, having monitored it first hand while being online, it seems that this was done in accordance with the text and spirit of the rules)

And at the same time would also like to remind that any repeated reloading/refreshing of the game info pages (such as airport info or slot info page) is not allowed.

In this case this was strike two. The user is banned until further clarification is obtained, and his airline is due for closure according to game rules.